Home automation has always been a fun, futuristic pipe-dream, as we all dream of the day our bed dumps us into the shower, and a conveyor belt delivers carries us through our closet and to the breakfast table, all without us actually waking up. Google says we’re closer, but I had to chuckle while looking at the garage door lock during the delay of the “Lock the garage door” command… “Or, lift your arm and turn the knob…” :-)

If you’re familiar with FlipBoard, you’re going to be impressed with FlipboardPageLayout. Nicely done! (Though while the Back/Forward buttons do skip through the flipped pages, it doesn’t go back to the home page, at least not on my latest Chrome.)

The Holy Grail of web design/development has always been the site-builder-GUI-WYSIWYG-type-thingy. And you either get something that makes ugly pages, or something that makes ugly code. Or both. Now Google is throwing their hat into this ring. Will be interesting to see what the geniuses from Menlo come up with.

Gesture-control is on its way, no question. Whether it will overtake mouse/touch is yet to be seen, but I imagine it will (why touch something when you can not?). But thus far gesture control has been kind of shitty. Until researchers at the University of Washington created a wi-fi system they’re calling “WiSee” that detects gestures using nothing but wifi, from the next room, with an “average accuracy [of] 94% with a standard deviation of 4.6% when classifying between our nine gestures.” Oh my…